One of the top use cases for Amazon Alexa is its ability to quickly summarize the day’s headlines via its customizable “Flash Briefing” skill. Now, Amazon is rolling out a new feature that will allow Alexa device owners to get more in-depth news from their preferred news provider, with this week’s launch of “long-form news.”…
Dr. Shayan Vyas is an associate professor of pediatric medicine at the University of Central Florida and an adviser to healthcare companies. I first got a glimpse of technology’s potential back in 2010. As a pediatrician at Miami Children’s Health System, I flew to Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake to…
This year at Google Cloud Next, the theme is all about supporting hybrid environments, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Apigee, the API company it bought in 2016 for $265 million, is also getting into the act. Today, Apigee announced the Beta of Apigee Hybrid, a new product designed for hybrid environments. Amit…
Thanks to pressure from tax preparation industry, Congress is getting ready to ban the Internal Revenue Service from ever building a free electronic tax filing system. As ProPublica reports, the effort is a bipartisan one. The House Ways and Means Committee, led by Massachusetts Democrat, Richard Neal, passed the Taxpayer First Act. The bill would…
Expanse, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based company that helps its clients understand and monitor what it calls their “global internet attack surface,” has received a $70 million vote of confidence from its earlier backers, as well as some notable individual investors. Previous investor TPG Growth led the Series C round, with participation from other earlier investors…
A team of Brazilian astronomers recently determined a giant exoplanet, over thirteen times more massive than Jupiter, is likely responsible for some funky orbital observations of a far away half-dead binary system. How it got there remains a mystery, but the scientists have some interesting theories. KIC 10544976 – or ‘the place where a big…
Good morning readers, it’s Patch Tuesday again—the day of the month when Adobe and Microsoft release security patches for their software. Adobe just released its monthly security updates to address a total of 40 security vulnerabilities in several of its products, including Flash Player, Adobe Acrobat and Reader, and Shockwave Player. According to an advisory,…
Jumbo could be a nightmare for the tech giants, but a savior for the victims of their shady privacy practices. Jumbo saves you hours as well as embarrassment by automatically adjusting 30 Facebook privacy settings to give you more protection, and by deleting your old tweets after saving them to your phone. It can even…
Google’s Cloud Next conference is taking over the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week and TechCrunch is on the scene covering all the latest announcements. Google Cloud already powers some of the world’s premier companies and startups, and now it’s poised to put even more pressure on cloud competitors like AWS with its newly-released…
Walmart is doubling down on its technology innovations in its brick-and-mortar stores in an effort to better compete with Amazon. The retailer today announced the expanded rollout of several technologies – ranging from in-store Pickup Towers to help customers quickly grab their online orders to floor scrubbing robots. These jobs were, in many cases, previously…
